A rebroad­cast from May 15^th, 2017: Salut­ing Irv­ing Berlin-Arguably the voice of Amer­i­ca for over a half cen­tu­ry, Israel Baline, or bet­ter known as Irv­ing Berlin, lived from May 11, 1888 until his 101^th birth­day to Sept. 22, 1989. Only one oth­er Amer­i­can com­pos­er lived to be 100; name­ly rag­time artist/​pianist Eubie Blake. And only one oth­er com­pos­er of this mag­ni­tude wrote the lyrics as well; name­ly Cole Porter. Berlin was born in Tyu­men, Rus­sia, and immi­grat­ed to New York as a child. He would become one of the most suc­cess­ful com­posers of all time , with hav­ing the extra­or­di­nary tal­ent of writ­ing both music and lyrics. He also became a major pub­lish­er. He pub­lished his first tune in 1907, ​‘Marie From Sun­ny Italy’; and his first major hit was ​‘Alexan­der’s Rag­time Band’ in 1911. He went on to com­pose more than 1500 songs, and score dozens of musi­cals and films. His gigan­tic hit from 1942’s ​‘Hol­i­day Inn’, ​“White Christ­mas” became the top sell­ing sin­gle of all time. Many of his oth­er clas­sics became part of Amer­i­ca’s musi­cal sound­track, such as ​‘East­er Parade’, ​‘God Bless Amer­i­ca’, ​‘There’s NO Busi­ness Like Show Busi­ness’, ​‘I’ve Got My Love To Keep Me Warm’, ​‘Always’, and ’ How Deep Is The Ocean’ only to name a very few. He won 7 Acad­e­my Awards in the song cat­e­go­ry. His mate­r­i­al has been cov­ered by a wide array of artists, from Sina­tra to Willie Nel­son, from Streisand to Lin­da Ron­stadt to Tony Ben­nett to Diana Krall. He would be 128 on the 11^th if he would have been grant­ed immor­tal­i­ty, which he rich­ly deserved.…There is a mar­velous biog­ra­phy on his life called ​‘As Thou­sands Cheer’ by Lau­rence Bergreen.